


be my mirror, my sword and shield

by bettercrazythanboring



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Other, Past Lives, Plants, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 15:57:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1393642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little known fact: Hunter was, indeed, Descartes a long time ago. He was also hundreds of other people, and numerous cuddly animals, and a variety of stationary leafy creatures capable of producing oxygen before that.  (And way before any of that, he was an alien overlord. But that's mostly irrelevant.)</p><p>When anyone comments on his weird and possibly failing relationship with Casey, they have no clue how deep that bond goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	be my mirror, my sword and shield

**Author's Note:**

> This is all actually based on a belief system I maybe possibly hold, but it's too complicated to lay out in succinct sentences in this note and it doesn't have a lookuppable name as far as I am aware, so read on and if something makes no sense, just... go with it.
> 
> Basically. Reincarnation. To all life, not just homo sapiens.
> 
> (Genders are open to interpretation.)
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZkm1xWPE)

Light. Warmth.

Those are the only two impressions I have the first life I live on this planet called Earth. I've been told it's a small lifetime for this section of space—mere three cycles of the sun before a creature larger than me rips my roots out of the ground and I fade back to my greater conscious. I've been told a lot of things—how this sector is so much harder to live in than those closer to the center of the universe, how there's so much more heartache and darkness here, how brave I am for daring to venture this far out.

My last eight hundred and thirteen lives were lived among creatures who brutally colonized every planet in their entire sector and killed each other for sport. I doubt all of those lifetimes together amounted to how long the average dominating creature on this planet lives. As I told all my friends already, I think I can handle Earth—even if I must start out as a blade of grass to get used to the feel it.

They said it would be dark, and for that I was prepared. But when my first lifetime ends, all I've experienced is a peaceful radiance surrounding me; the kind I haven't felt in a long time. I expected to figuratively grit my mind between lives and have to force myself to enter the next one—for the good of my development as a soul, to broaden my experiences—but the time comes and instead of that, I simply can't wait to go back.

This time, I get to be three blades of grass at once. I last ten cycles and soak up all the energy in the air via a feeding system I don't think I've ever encountered before. I practically bounce with excitement up there, in the center, in between.

My third life, I'm an entire field of grass and have become used to the senses of it. The wind tickles me and sends little things in the air—particles, I was told about these—from all around the place; the boy from three fields over enjoys making food that makes the air feel sharp and hot on the north side of each piece of me. The sensation is interesting enough that I don't mind. But the wind from a few cycles later isn't nearly as pleasant; it murks up my senses and cuts off my access to that wonderful light and warmth, and I can feel myself losing some of the vitality and life force I hold so dear. It passes soon, but I feel like I did before coming to this planet—corrupted and dirty—and I begin to see what they said about the darkness.

I start to wait for my demise, so that I can be new and fresh and perfect again, but it seems I have no way to speed up the process. I wait and wait, and wait, and lose sight of the cycles that have passed, and still I'm alive. I can't feel the tops of my blades anymore; they're shrunken and lifeless, and crispy. It's as if I'm being pushed down, lower and lower to the ground with each cycle, until the disease has spread all the way down to my roots. It's unnatural; I had thought my natural impulse was to reach up, toward the light.

I wait, and that's when I first realize you're there.

All this time, there's been something all around me that I could not understand. It was explained to me, before I came here, that lives in this sector are lived with much less of a connection to the world around them than most of us are used to. That there would be many senses I couldn't quantify, only vaguely grasp. That here, only two lives out of a thousand are ones where I would truly understand the world, myself, and everyone around me. It was the oddest thing I'd ever been told, but my curiosity was piqued, and so I accepted it; all this time, I merely thought that what I felt was one of those mysterious senses.

Turns out it was you.

You grow between my wisps, densely scattered to the point I can't even comprehend. There is no end to you, not in the edges of my field— _our_  field—nor anywhere within them. I focus on the air above us and the many senses I have not learned to analyze; we are evenly chequered here, and our roots have been entangled this whole time.

It's only a few cycles later that I realize why I sensed your presence in the first place. You were carried in the wind all over me, and wormed your way—puffy, soft, and light—into the ground right next to every blade I call my own, and then you… died.

One by one, all of you died, until I couldn't find you anywhere.

The truth is my whole perspective on this planet, the place I'm supposed to spend a seventy-third of an eternity in, was born out of misconceptions. That feeling of tranquility, everything I experienced that first lifetime wasn't the sun welcoming me to this planet, this blazing star that is unusually small and unusually close to inhabited planets. It was you. It was all you.

They'll tell me later that you were something called a dandelion. They'll tell me you perished in the summer winds, stripped of your seeds, so much later than was to be expected. They'll wonder why.

And I won't care about any of it because the first thing I was told upon choosing Earth as my next home was how hard it would be to connect to other souls down here. Not like the center sectors, or even my last home. The hundreds and thousands of lifetimes most go through being able to  _love_  here—genuinely and spectacularly, and without any internal deceit at all.

You're gone; I continue to grow, but not for long. The drought and scorching heat has done its job, and only a few cycles pass before I, too, return to the higher plane. But instead of being there, you're already deep into your next life. I don't know it yet, but I will never be able to find you here, among the tranquility and light, and reprieve from the horrors of the lives we've chosen to live. For as long as both of us are on Earth, an amount of time humans will later decide to categorize as three dozen thousands of years, we will never be dead at the same time, never able to exist together in our truest of ways. Impatient, we are; always racing toward the next life just to see each other again, before one of us races too far ahead.

I don't know any of that yet, now, after my third life, but I do know that I'm lucky. Even if you'll always be a step ahead of me—smarter, braver, older, more experienced—and I can never keep up, I'm lucky.

I found you on my first try.

* * *

 

When I become long grass, you're the ant colony that keeps the earth healthy and protects me from pests. I keep you safe from the whims of weather and you like feasting on my seeds sometimes. You make a habit of crawling up one wisp and swaying along to the wind with me; it feels almost like dancing, something I haven't done in a long, long time.

It's simple and nice, and exactly what I need after so many lives of death and violence, but I want to dance with you for real. I want to know what you're thinking, to see how you look, to hear the world around me. I didn't have any of those senses in my last sector and I haven't gained them here either, and I only have vague memories of ever having them, and I'm turning impatient at how trapped I am.

The peaceful calm here is  _wonderful_ , and so is the way our energies mesh together, but I want more.

I'm greedy. I want to be with you in every way possible on this strange planet. My thoughts are rough and unfocused, and I have no language to think in, barely any sentience to speak of, but you are real and tangible, and you're the only thing I am sure of in these long autumn nights. My previous senses don't translate to this world, and neither do any of my experiences of what it means to be together with someone, but I want you with everything I am, and something resembling excitement rushes through me at the vague thoughts of discovering what exactly that means here.

Do you want the same? It seems like it, from the vibrations your energy gives off. From the way ours mingle together and create harmony. But I have no way of knowing here. I just hope we'll find each other throughout our entire long journey on this planet. I know I'd recognize your unique feel anywhere. It's all a matter of timing and placement. But if we both want it hard enough, it has to happen, right?

As flames engulf me and it becomes clear it's the end of this session, knowing you are safely underground starts hurting. It could be the last time I ever feel you near me, the last time we're ever together. And even if it's not, so many cycles or even seasons could pass before I find you again.

I burn, and when my conscious drifts back into safety, where things make sense and I have names for all those thoughts and experiences I've ever had, I only try to figure out one of them: is this going to be my last thought every time I die? The fear of never seeing you again?

* * *

 

I'm a flower; you're a bee. I'm an ant; you're the most magnificent bush. I'm a snail; you're a tree.

Lifetimes pass in a blur, going on and on and on, and, by the time I'm a forest and you're a squirrel, something's changed. It's a backward thing about this sector, one I've never heard of happening anywhere else, but they told me that the more control we have over our own lives, the more active we are in shaping our existence, the less we know ourselves, the less we understand the truths of the universe. The less we remember our other lifetimes.

I did not quite understand before, how all this knowledge and sense of self could simply disappear for lives at a time, but I do now that you're now a singular creature capable of moving and fending for itself in ways more active than mine. Your energy has changed; you're quicker and more agitated. I begin to understand then, and the thought of me changing this way, of not knowing how much there is to know out there… It's terrifying.

Even more so is me ever forgetting the light you've brought into my life. But then you continue to wander around among my trees and I start to wonder… If I do forget you and this connection we have, it won't disappear. We might just be… less aware of it than I still am. And when that happens, will I completely rediscover you each with each lifetime? Will we stumble across each other and think it a coincidence, not the inevitable act of fate?

And all of a sudden I am no longer terrified.

* * *

 

 

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* * *

 

 

"Leave us," you command the guards, who obey at once. One unwavering glance, and so do your advisors. All but me.

The chilly evening winds ruffle the the papers on our desk and I move the paperweight gift from Babylon almost automatically, the same as you take my hand without thinking and lay your lips on mine.

"I thought you wanted to discuss battle strategy, Your Majesty," I whisper against your mouth with no attempt to remove myself from your hold.

You move the papers out of the way—along with the paperweight—and start untying my shirt. "I do. Later."

* * *

 

" _Monsters!_ " I scream, bruising my already battered wrists against the uneven cuffs. "She has taught you and helped you, and saved your ungrateful lives, and  _this is how you repay her?_ " I snarl. One of my knees tears open from the thrashing. " _Greta!_ "

There's a kind of grace when you kneel, mouth set in hard lines and rigid silence, your muddy robes falling half off the stone steps. I want you to fight, to run, to  _beg_  if that's what it takes, but your head's held high and still, as if this were a church and you were merely paying respects. You're  _better_  than this, I think as someone stuffs my mouth with cloth—I leave a mark on their index finger that will last for weeks. You don't have to take their schemes for power, their playing God, their self-righteous arrogance; their  _fear_ ; their ignorance will end this world the day after tomorrow, or soon after that, and you're behaving as if this is your  _duty_!

FIGHT! Make them pay! Please… please…

You only look beyond, to something they can't see, past the masses of people. I search for the fire in you even as my vision clouds to the point of near blindness—maybe I'm looking hard enough that the setting sun has turned into flames in your eyes.  _Please… Please…_  The man I will forever hate raises his sword and I rattle my chains so hard that three cracks echo across the quiet square, and that's when you turn to me. In your gaze, I see the promise you made to me long ago, under the stars on a distant summer night, and I know this is the end. But there's a hardness to your eyes that wasn't there before. If only I could've heard what you told the pastor after you drowned, when you said you could finally see the truth...

The sword comes down and I can no longer hear anything but the sound of my screams, muffled but somehow made stronger by the gag. So loud am I that the only thing I feel after that, the only thing remotely important enough to be aware of after your head rolls down the steps in a pool of red, is something icy and smooth impaling me.

But I don't feel it, not really. I don't feel anything but the absence of you. Not until your blood catches fire on its own, sparking, burning, ravaging high up into the air, and sends this entire town to what I'm sure will be Hell.

* * *

 

"No," you say, "I am not leaving you here."

"Come on." I draw in a shallow breath. "I've been through worse, haven't I?"

"Yeah, the acne doesn't count." Your hands work quickly to bandage my side; the enemy horn blares in the distance, closer than it was the last time. "Now, come on, grab onto my shoulder and I'll get you somewhere safe, and you'll be fine, and get a medal for your service." There's a hiccup in your voice on the last words.

"Wen, come on." I cough up blood and wipe it with my torn sleeve. "You know that's not gonna happen. I'm as good as dead."

Your fist clenches with the tenacity I admire most about you and then relaxes, and for a moment I actually think it's going to work, that you'll leave me and save yourself, and live out a long, happy life with someone who isn't stupid enough to confront an entire battalion with just a few comrades. (Even if we did win,  _technically_.) But then you pick me up as easily as you would a bucket of water, and sling me over your weary horse, and patt me lightly on the butt.

"Gonna take more than that to get rid of me, you idiot."

* * *

 

This house is a work of art, I keep thinking even three hours after setting foot in it. The details of the chandelier, the smooth carvings of the railings, detailing history as we know it through drawings more intricate than those of the Sistine Chapel, the embroidered wallpaper… A dream has been fulfilled tonight in this living fairytale, and I don't ever want to leave the solitary of these magnificent walls, to the music and lights below.

What use is being among people in a place like this, on a night like this?

But I am only allowed here as long as I am among people, and I must make my way back to them, and steel myself to another evening without my best friend who caught the sea bug early on and left me for seven months this time. Perhaps tonight is the night I learn to make conversation like a useful human being.

It's only minutes later that someone partners us up for a dance, even though I cannot dance and do not know the person, and know you even less, with only momentary glances exchanged through the night. But abide by the rules I must, and so we embark on a journey of what is sure to be clumsy feet and sweaty palms.

How we end up talking for the rest of the night on the dimly lit balcony into the wee hours of the morning, long after everyone else has gone to bed, I'll never know.

* * *

 

"You're not listening to me," you say. "I  _know_  you. I've known you about a thousand times."

"...did we go to Jones' party last year or something? 'Cause... there was more weed there than in most of Europe, I think."

"No, I'm not high." You drag a hand through your hair, getting more frustrated by the minute. " _Or_  drunk, or insane, or stalking you. I just don't understand why you don't remember. We're soulmates," you say, as if it's the most obvious thing on this campus.

I put down my drink and glance over to my significant other. "Well, give me a call when you figure it out, then. And good luck with your Buddhism or whatever it is you believe, but I've already got a soulmate."

And that's the end of that.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"What happened back there?" the guy with the scarf asks with a leer in his voice.

"Dunno." My body feels light, as if it's lost half its weight. A smile spreads across my lips. "I think I just fell in love or something," I say.

**Author's Note:**

> I basically dared myself to write a good plants au. Clearly, I failed.


End file.
